Abstract
This paper reviews the fundamentals of the Exergy Cost Theory, an energy cost accounting methodology to evaluate the physical costs of products of energy systems and their associated waste. Besides, a mathematical and computationally approach is presented, which will allow the practitioner to carry out studies on production systems regardless of their structural complexity. The exergy cost theory was proposed in 1986 by Valero et al. in their “General theory of exergy savings”. It has been recognized as a powerful tool in the analysis of energy systems and has been applied to the evaluation of energy saving alternatives, local optimisation, thermoeconomic diagnosis, or industrial symbiosis. The waste cost formation process is presented from a thermodynamic perspective rather than the economist’s approach. It is proposed to consider waste as external irreversibilities occurring in plant processes. A new concept, called irreversibility carrier, is introduced, which will allow the identification of the origin, transfer, partial recovery, and disposal of waste.
Highlights
Flows to be disposed enter as fuel of the dissipative unit (DIS) together with the resources required to eliminate them; the product of the dissipative unit is the removed exergy, flow (r ), that connects with a waste stream to the environment (ENV), which redistributes the cost among the productive units (u) and (v) that produce it
Equation (52) means that the production cost is equal to the sum of the cost of exergy streams eliminated in this dissipative unit, and the waste cost must be allocated to the processes have produced them
This paper reviews the fundamentals of the Exergy Cost Theory, an energy cost accounting methodology for assessing physical costs that incorporates both the production of products and their associated waste
Summary
The usual thermoeconomic methods, such as ECT, average cost theory [5], or the specific cost method of exergy calculation (SPECO) [6], do not soundly address the problem of waste cost allocation. It means that waste or external losses should be considered not as flows that leave the system through a dissipative process but as irreversibilities, which originate before, during the production process, but manifest themselves externally It introduces a new methodology for calculating exergy costs, which combines graph theory [13] and productive linear models [14] with the Exergy Cost Theory, providing a rigorous mathematical approach, a more robust software implementation, and integrating waste cost allocation into the model
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